[NetEase Smart News May 16] According to TechCrunch, Apple recently acquired Lattice Data for approximately US$200 million. Lattice Data uses artificial intelligence (AI) to transform unstructured data (such as images and text) into usable structured data. About 20 engineers from Lattice Data now join the Apple team. Lattice is not fully disclosed. It does not need to attract the attention of the technology circle. Lattice was founded in 2015 and has the commercial core technology of the Dark Data project of the Stanford DeepDive system. The DeepDive system was founded by Christopher Ré (Stanford Professor, MacArthur Genius Prize Winner), Michael Cafarella (Hadoop co-founder), Raphael Hoffmann, and Feng Niu. In 2013, about 4.4 ZB of data was generated, and this number is still growing rapidly, reaching 44 ZB by 2020. According to IBM, about 90% of the existing data has been generated in the past two years. However, 70%-80% of the data are "dark data", ie they are unstructured and cannot be used for analysis. It is like a huge database without any tags, categories, or any other structure. Without an organizational structure, it has no place, but once it is organized, there are innumerable ways to use it. This is what the DeepDive system and Lattice do. Now they will join Apple. In investing in artificial intelligence, Apple is very prominent. Facebook, Google and Microsoft are all investing in artificial intelligence. According to The Motley Fool, 2017 is a year of investing in artificial intelligence. According to Fortune Magazine, on the list of CB Insights 100, 50 are artificial intelligence startups, 39 are located in the United States, and 39 of them are located in the United States. It can be seen that the investment in artificial intelligence is booming. According to Tractica, the market value of artificial intelligence in 2016 is US$6.437 billion and will double in 2017. It is estimated that by 2025, it will reach 36.8 billion U.S. dollars. Apple and other companies are aware that this is the best time to invest in artificial intelligence. (English source/futurism compiler/machine reviser/preface) 燑br>